Lead Management and Demand Generation – Different, Equal, Powerful

Ken Murray founded VanillaSoft in 2003. Over the course of his career, he designed and built inside sales campaigns for numerous Fortune 500 companies and SMBs. His sales groups generated in excess of $1 billion annually in sales. Ken also consulted with companies to increase productivity and profitability of their inside sales groups through automating their sales process. Ken commercialized the sales automation product that he had built to drive these inside sales teams which became VanillaSoft.
Ken authored the VanillaSoft blog for many years and published numerous white papers including “Why Traditional CRM is Not Enough.” Ken was an alum of the Harvard Business School where he focused on strategy and process.

Lauren shared that “demand generation” and “lead management” are two terms that are well known but are often times confused and thought to be the same thing. Lauren posted a great two-part whiteboard session with Carlos Hidalgo, CEO of Annuitas Group and Executive Director of the Marketing Automation Institute.

In the video, Carlos defines both terms and explains how companies should view them not as separate entities, but a dual proposition. I like the simple but elegant explanation Carlos gives.